To: Stoctrash who wrote (32894 ) 5/4/1998 5:33:00 PM From: John Rieman Respond to of 50808
Video on Demand......................................ijumpstart.com With an eye towards the $15 billion video tape rental and sales market, Scientific Atlanta [SFA] has announced a partnership with Seachange International [SEAC], a provider of MPEG-2 video server systems to the television industry, to develop a complete, server-to-set top digital video-on-demand (VOD) system for cable networks. If successful, cable operators could see a boom in video-on-demand, a technology that has had its share of ups and downs in recent years. Scientific Atlanta has already taken orders for its Explorer 2000 set-top box from nine major cable NSOs including Time Warner (which has doubled its order to 1.6 million units) and Cox Communications [COX] in San Diego with a subscriber base of 482,000. Cox has ordered an initial quantity of 15,000 Explorer set-top boxes and headend equipment and will launch Cox Digital TV in San Diego later this year. Seachange International will provide the servers that store libraries of Hollywood movies, documentaries, and other videos for immediate access by cable subscribers. And it will provide its content management system to interface with Scientific Atlanta's digital network control system. The content management system controls the video content as well as associated critical data, such as information on movie ratings and royalties. In addition to VOD capability, The Explorer 2000 set-top will give cable operators strong competitive advantages over DBS and other wireless services with throughput two-way communications, interactive applications for cable subscribers, including Internet access, home shopping and IP-based applications.